Uniregistry CEO Frank Schilling has expressed his “surprise” that GoDaddy has decided to stop selling his company’s gTLDs, but said he expects the registrar to return in future.

GoDaddy’s decision to stop new registrations and inbound transfers for Uniregistry’s portfolio of gTLDs came after the registry revealed price increases for 16 strings that ranged from nominal to over 3,000%.

The registrar told Domain Name Wire yesterday that Uniregistry’s move presented “an extremely poor customer experience” and “does not reflect well on the domain name industry”.

Registrars are of course the customer-facing end of the domain name industry, and the burden of explaining renewal price increases of 5x falls on their shoulders.

But Schilling seems to expect the ban to be temporary.

“We are extremely surprised by GoDaddy’s reaction but are pleased that our extensions are available at many other registrars who support our approach. We remain ready to support GoDaddy when they decide on a path which works for their customers,” he told DI today.

“We expect them to return,” he added.

It’s a plausible prediction. GoDaddy’s statement to DNW said Uniregistry had been cut off “until we can assess the impact on our current and potential customers”, which suggests it’s not necessarily permanent.

GoDaddy is Uniregistry’s first or second-largest registrar in most of the affected gTLDs.

But because the gTLDs in question have so few domains in them, the number of GoDaddy-sponsored domains is typically under 1,000 per gTLD.

Even in the much larger zones of .click and .link (which are receiving small price increases and will still wholesale for under $10), GoDaddy’s exposure is just a few thousand domains and it’s nowhere near the market leader.

I wonder how much of GoDaddy’s decision to drop Uniregistry has to do with the reaction from domain investors.

Ever since DI broke the news of the price increases a week ago, there’s been a stream of angry domainer blog and forum posts, condemning Schilling and Uniregistry for the decision and using the move as a stick to batter the whole new gTLD program.

For registrars, it doesn’t necessarily strike me a terrible deal.

While they will have to deal with customer fallout, over the longer term higher wholesale prices means bigger margins.

Registrars are already adding about a hundred bucks to the $300 cost of a .game domain, and the price increase from $10 to $300 of the Spanish equivalent, .juegos, likely means similar margins there too.

Comments (29)

While GoDaddy might not be the market leader by new gTLDs registration volume (i.e. number of domains), it may very well be that they’re on top when considering overall new gTLDs registration REVENUES, given that they didn’t participate in many of the promos at less than $1 that other registrars did.

At DomainGang, Theo calculated that GoDaddy represented just 2.7% of Punyregistry’s total registrations (for the TLDs with price increases), see:

Acro: As I pointed out in a comment submitted earlier (that hasn’t shown up yet), it’s likely that GoDaddy represents a more significant fraction of REVENUES (as opposed to just registration volume), given they weren’t doing all the promos for less than $1 that other registrars were/are doing.

Rev – I did the math that relates GoDaddy to Uniregistry. Cherry-picking gTLDs would skew the math. I could have included the non-hiked gTLDs but since GoDaddy blocks these too, it seems that it’s a policy against Uniregistry, not against price hikes.

I pointed out the relation of gTLD to price hike already (link/click have the lowest.)

I don’t know how you can assess the quality of GoDaddy customers from the gTLD registration numbers – only GoDaddy knows. Numbers are impersonal.

Agreed, I don’t think Godaddy even knows what it will do going forward. The reason they pulled all of Uniregistry strings was because they can’t take the chance, they could raise the price 10,000% next month.

Better they work backwards, and work with the registrants they have, and limit their exposure to blowback, even though others thing end users will pay anything for a bunch of non tangible binary characters.

Highly likely Godaddy would push for something like that. Will registries sign though? Most ntlds are going to need large price increases to become profitable, they maybe be better of just winging it and saying no.

What Frank and others should have done was start at $300 and worked his way back down. That way the registrars and the customers don’t get pissed off as hell.

As a clueless end-user if I had a domain at GoDaddy and then the price went up $300 from $10 I would never do business with GoDaddy again, even though it’s not their fault. I would not care what the explanation was why the price went up because they are the one that sold me the domain.

It’s so patently unfair to end-users and ICANN, being the scumbags they are, never put price any of these extensions, or even legacy extensions that matter.

Shame on ICANN
Shame on Frank
Shame on Uniregistry

Everyone knew well in advance that these things would never sell and now look where we are, in a sh*t hole.

I put 90% of the blame on ICANN for allowing this kind of system to exist. Could ICANN be any worse than organization?

As reported last week by many different people, this is one of the death blows to nTLDs. It won’t be a swift kill by any means. It will likely take a decade and slowly TLDs will pop and fizzle out. The writing is on the wall and such a move by Uni shows how foolish one would be to build a business on a fundamentally questionable business model.

ICANN let the cat out of the bag 3 years ago, and it’s never going back in. Fact.

I understand the time is ripe for some to spit out venom, but there is no “I told you so” moment here.

A single registry’s decision on a handful of unpopular gTLDs does not dictate the value or potential of the gTLD program; in fact, this is the best thing that can happen, a raw awakening, that money for Registries isn’t in domain investors.

Anyone stating new GTLDs are “doomed” is delusional, protecting their 1000+ .com legacy business or a paid commentator. Anonymous blog trolls lie. Numbers do not. There are 25 mil names registered today. in 10 years there will be 100 million. These same sorts of doomsday remarks got posted up when there were 1 mil names in new gold

Anyone stating new GTLDs are “doomed” is delusional, protecting their 1000+ .com legacy business or a paid commentator. Anonymous blog trolls lie. Numbers do not. There are 25 mil names registered today. in 10 years there will be 100 million. These same sorts of doomsday remarks got posted up when there were 1 mil names in new gold

I don’t think GoDaddy’s move has anything to do with domainer gripes. Domainers are easy to explain the price increase to: Hey, blame Frank. It’s the end users that registered domains at GoDaddy and built websites on them that will be hard to explain this to.

Hello Andrew,
Youre comment = ” It’s the end users that registered domains at GoDaddy and built websites on them that will be hard to explain this to.”
Go-Daddys injection of new TLDs into The S.E.M. Platform will eventually cause disaster for Go-daddy. To count on the S.E.M. Platform for strategically gaining any upper hand is totally counter-intuitive. Jas 3/15/17